Returning to school can be very stressful and overwhelming for most students. Teens often have a lot of mental health issues, especially during the back-to-school season, because of the change in routine and lack of freedom. The change in routine for students is so hard because, in most scenarios, summer gives time for many students to break from waking up early in the morning and gives them the freedom to do what they want. Changing this routine makes a lot of students stress about deadlines, priorities, expectations, homework, and schoolwork.
Why has mental health been stated as a teen crisis? In 2022 the United States reached the highest number of cases of mental health in teens after coming back to school. “Many children and students struggle with mental health challenges that impact their full access to and participation in learning, and these challenges are often misunderstood and can lead to behaviors that are inconsistent with school or program expectations,” says the Tucson Department of Education when speaking about how to deal with teen mental health. After these cases kept rising and rising, the state took it into its own hands and declared it as such a crisis that they upped their school mental health resources as much as possible.
“They tend to engage in high-risk behaviors including drug and alcohol use,” says youth.gov. Though kids think that this is a way to deal with this stress, it makes anxiety way worse. The students who deal with mental health by smoking and doing drugs start to fall behind and feel more and more stressed over time. They are conditioned to think that this is helping with their anxiety and making it better by these big companies. Newsflash…it’s not.
When kids go back to school they may act like everything is okay and make an effort to seem happy, but may be very overwhelmed and sad, which may result in bad behavior. These bad behaviors, such as doing drugs, make brain processes harder to control because they convince you that it makes you stronger or more invincible. Every parent wants their kid to be happy and safe as much as possible. Try your best to connect with your kid and help them as much as possible because you never know what’s going on under the surface. Some recourses you can go to if you are suffering from mental health and thinking about potentially harming yourself. Teen lifeline: 602-248-TEEN (8336), National suicide prevention hotline: Call 988, Crisis text hotline: text HOME to 741-741.
